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Saturday, September 18, 2010

Shariah: The Threat to America

Team B II, a group of highly accomplished civilian and military national security professionals, is releasing a major new national security assessment examining the threat posed by Shariah to America.

The 177-page report, Shariah: The Threat to America, will be released at a Capitol Hill press conference on Wednesday, September 15, 2010 at 12:30 p.m. EDT in U.S. Capitol Room HC-6. Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), and Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) will offer remarks, along with leading Team B II authors including Center for Security Policy president Frank Gaffney, former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Lieutenant General William G. “Jerry” Boykin and terrorism expert and former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew C. McCarthy.

Team B II Report, sponsored by the Center for Security Policy, offers a compelling and comprehensive "second opinion" on the dominant threat of our time: the totalitarian legal-political-military doctrine known within Islam as Shariah. The authoritative report, which is based on six months of intensive study, takes inspiration from the original 1976 “Team B” report that challenged the then-prevailing U.S. government intelligence estimates about the intentions and offensive capabilities of the Soviet Union during a period of “détente.” Similarly, the Team B II report challenges the status quo and conventional wisdom in Washington by elucidating the grave threat posed by Shariah to America’s legal system, Constitution, national security, and way of life.

The full report on Shariah: The Threat to America will be available as a softcover book in October, 2010, and can be downloaded from the website www.shariahthethreat.com as of 12:30 pm, Wednesday September 15, 2010. Distinguished members of Team B II include R. James Woolsey, former Director of Central Intelligence, Lieutenant General Harry "Ed" Soyster, former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant General William G. "Jerry" Boykin, and former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Andrew C. McCarthy, former Assistant U.S. Attorney.

Frank Gaffney states, “With this policy study, the Center intends to catalyze national awareness about Shariah and the peril America faces absent informed and concerted action to confront and defeat the agenda of all who support the encroachment of this alien legal system at the expense of established U.S. law and traditions.”

The Center for Security Policy (CSP) is a non-profit, non-partisan organization committed to securing freedom by applying the Reagan philosophy of “Peace through Strength.” For more information about the Center please visit www.SecureFreedom.org. The full “Shariah: The Threat to America” report can be read online at www.shariahthethreat.com at 12:00 noon EDT on September 15, 2010.

The list of contributors is impressive, based on those whom I know personally or through their writings. They include:

• Clare Lopez, Christine Brim, and Frank Gaffney of CSP

• Steve Coughlin, the pre-eminent expert on Islamic law

• Andrew C. McCarthy, prosecutor of the Blind Sheikh and the author of The Grand Jihad

• Diana West, author of The Death of the Grown-Up

• David Yerushalmi, who has done so much valuable legal work on behalf of the Counterjihad

• Patrick Poole, who wrote the ground-breaking report on “The Project”

• Brian Kennedy of the Claremont Institute

• Tom Trento of Florida Security Council

• James Woolsey, former Director of the CIA

I haven’t read the entire document yet — it’s 177 pages long — but below are some excerpts from the introduction:

The Contemporary Threat

Today, the United States faces what is, if anything, an even more insidious ideological threat: the totalitarian socio-political doctrine that Islam calls shariah. Translated as “the path,” shariah is a comprehensive legal and political framework. Though it certainly has spiritual elements, it would be a mistake to think of shariah as a “religious” code in the Western sense because it seeks to regulate all manner of behavior in the secular sphere — economic, social, military, legal and political.

Shariah is the crucial fault line of Islam’s internecine struggle. On one side of the divide are Muslim reformers and authentic moderates — figures like Abdurrahman Wahid, the late president of Indonesia and leader of the world’s largest libertarian Muslim organization, Nahdlatul Ulama — whose members embrace the Enlightenment’s veneration of reason and, in particular, its separation of the spiritual and secular realms. On this side of the divide, shariah is a reference point for a Muslim’s personal conduct, not a corpus to be imposed on the life of a pluralistic society.

By contrast, the other side of the divide is dominated by Muslim supremacists, often called Islamists. Like erstwhile proponents of Communism and Nazism, these supremacists — some terrorists, others employing stealthier means — seek to impose a totalitarian regime: a global totalitarian system cloaked as an Islamic state and called a caliphate. On that side of the divide, which is the focus of the present study, shariah is an immutable, compulsory system that Muslims are obliged to install and the world required to adopt, the failure to do so being deemed a damnable offence against Allah. For these ideologues, shariah is not a private matter. Adherents see the West as an obstacle to be overcome, not a culture and civilization to be embraced, or at least tolerated. It is impossible, they maintain, for alternative legal systems and forms of governments peacefully to coexist with the end-state they seek.

The Team B II Consensus

Like their counterparts a generation ago, the members of Team B II collectively bring to this task decades of hands-on experience as security policy practitioners and analysts, much of it involving shariah’s proponents of both the violent jihadist and pre-violent dawa stripes. They have distinguished backgrounds in national defense policy-making, military, intelligence, homeland security and law enforcement communities, in academia and in the War of Ideas. Thanks to their expertise and dedication, this new report represents an authoritative, valuable and timely critique of the U.S. government’s present policy towards shariah and its adherents, an assessment of the threat it entails and a call for a long-overdue course-correction. It reflects consensus on the following significant points: First, the shariah adherents who comprise the supremacist camp constitute a mainstream and dynamic movement in Islam. Importantly, that characterization does not speak to the question of whether this camp is or is not representative of the “true Islam.” There are over a billion Muslims in the world, and their understandings about their belief-system, as well as their practices with respect to it, vary. In light of this, there may not be a single “true Islam.” If there is one, we do not presume to pronounce what it holds.

What cannot credibly be denied, however, is that:

1. Shariah is firmly rooted in Islam’s doctrinal texts, and it is favored by influential Islamic commentators, institutions, and academic centers (for example, the faculty at al-Azhar University in Cairo, for centuries the seat of Sunni learning and jurisprudence);

2. Shariah has been, for over a half-century, lavishly financed and propagated by Islamic regimes (particularly Saudi Arabia and Iran), through the offices of disciplined international organizations (particularly the Muslim Brotherhood); and

3. Due to the fact that Islam lacks a central, universally recognized hierarchical authority (in contrast to, say, the Roman Catholic papacy), authentic Islamic moderates and reformers have an incredibly difficult task in endeavoring to delegitimize shariah in the community where it matters most: the world’s Muslims.

Consequently, regardless of what percentage of the global Islamic population adheres or otherwise defers to shariah (and some persuasive polling indicates that percentage is high in many Islamic countries), it is punching well above its weight. For that reason, it is a serious threat to the United States even if we assume, for argument’s sake, that hopeful pundits are correct in claiming that shariah Islam is not the preponderant Muslim ideology.

A second point is that it is vital to the national security of the United States, and to Western civilization at large, that we do what we can to empower Islam’s authentic moderates and reformers. That cannot be done by following the failed strategy of fictionalizing the state of Islam in the vain hope that reality will, at some point, catch up to the benign fable. Empowering the condign elements of Islam requires a candid assessment, which acknowledges the strength of shariah — just as defeat of Twentieth Century totalitarian ideologies required an acknowledgment of, and respect for, their malevolent capabilities. To do this, it is paramount that we no longer allow those who mean to destroy our society — including to sabotage it from within — to camouflage themselves as “moderates.” The definition of moderation needs to be reset, to bore in on the shariah fault-line. Only by identifying those Muslims who wish to impose shariah can we succeed in marginalizing them.

As this study manifests, the shariah system is totalitarian. It imposes itself on all aspects of civil society and human life, both public and private. Anyone obliged actually to defend the proposition that shariah should be adopted here will find few takers and be properly seen for what they are — marginal and extremist figures. That, and only that, will strengthen true proponents of a moderate or reformist Islam that embraces freedom and equality.

Third, we have an obligation to protect our nation and our way of life regardless of the ultimate resolution of Islam’s internal strife. We can do a far better job of empowering non-shariah-adherent Muslims, who are our natural allies, but we cannot win for them — they have to do that for themselves. Irrespective of whether they succeed in the formidable task of delegitimizing shariah globally, we must face it down in the United States, throughout the West and wherever on earth it launches violent or ideological offensives against us.

Shariah is Anti-constitutional

If we are to face down shariah, we must understand what we are up against, not simply hope that dialogue and “engagement” will make the challenge go away. Those who today support shariah and the establishment of a global Islamic state (caliphate) are perforce supporting objectives that are incompatible with the U.S. Constitution, the civil rights the Constitution guarantees and the representative, accountable government it authorizes. In fact, shariah’s pursuit in the United States is tantamount to sedition.

Whether pursued through the violent form of jihad (holy war) or stealthier practices that shariah Islamists often refer to as “dawa“ (the “call to Islam”), shariah rejects fundamental premises of American society and values:

1. The bedrock proposition that the governed have a right to make law for themselves;

4. Freedom of expression (including the liberty to analyze and criticize shariah)

5. Economic liberty (including private property);

6. Equal treatment under the law (including that of men and women, and of Muslims and non-Muslims);

7. Freedom from cruel and unusual punishments; an unequivocal condemnation of terrorism (i.e., one that is based on a common sense meaning of the term and does not rationalize barbarity as legitimate “resistance”); and

8. An abiding commitment to deflate and resolve political controversies by the ordinary mechanisms of federalism and democracy, not wanton violence.

The subversion campaign known as Civilization Jihad must not be confused with, or tolerated as, a constitutionally protected form of religious practice. Its ambitions transcend what American law recognizes as the sacrosanct realm of private conscience and belief. It seeks to supplant our Constitution with its own totalitarian framework. In fact, we get this concept of “civilization jihad” from, among other sources, a document that was entered into evidence in the 2008 United States v Holy Land Foundation terrorist finance trial titled the An Explanatory Memorandum: On the General Strategic Goal for the Group.

The Explanatory Memorandum was written in 1991 by Mohamed Akram, a senior Hamas leader in the U.S. and a member of the Board of Directors for the Muslim Brotherhood in North America (MB, also known as the Ikhwan). The document makes plain that the Islamic Movement is a MB effort, led by the Ikhwan in America. The Explanatory Memorandum goes on to explain that the “Movement” is a “settlement process” to establish itself inside the United States and, once established, to undertake a “grand jihad” characterized as a “civilization jihadist” mission that is likewise led by the Muslim Brotherhood. Specifically, the document describes the “settlement process” as a “grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated….”

To put it simply, according to the Muslim Brotherhood, the civilization jihad is the “Settlement Process” and the “Settlement Process” is the mission of the “Islamic Movement.” And that mission entails “eliminating and destroying” our way of life. Author Robert Spencer has popularized this concept with a term that captures both the character and deadly purpose of the Ikhwan’s efforts in America: “stealth jihad.”

The “Explanatory Memorandum” — the Holy Land Foundation smoking gun — is the key document in the case against “moderate” Muslims in America. It exposes more than 90% of their organizations as fronts and shell groups for al-Ikhwan al-Muslimeen, the Muslim Brotherhood, whose publicly-stated aim is to overthrow by subversion the secular constitutional government of the United States and replace it with Islamic law. They have succeeded very well so far in their efforts, thanks to penetration, disinformation, the co-optation of existing organizations, and the willing collaboration of the Socialist Left. The Team B II document will shine a major light into those dark corners of our national political process which the Left and the Ikhwan would prefer to remain hidden.